Smithsonian Castle is presented as the historic heart of the Smithsonian Institution: a red-sandstone, Gothic- and Romanesque-inspired building that once housed America’s first real science museum. In Peter Solomon’s illustrated address to students, it becomes more than an architectural landmark. Its history links James Smithson’s bequest to the national ambition to cultivate and circulate knowledge, while its transformation into part of a larger museum network gives that ambition a continuing public form.

Appearance and Setting

A photograph first invites the students to mistake the castle for a Norman building in England. Peter corrects them with a view that places its towers in Washington, D.C., close to the white dome of the U.S. Capitol. The building’s Seneca Creek sandstone, square towers, and Gothic embellishments create an old-world silhouette in the American capital. The projected photographs also show the castle’s earlier interior: a vaulted ballroom filled with animal skeletons, scientific cases, biological specimens, archaeological artifacts, and casts of prehistoric reptiles.

From Bequest to Museum

Peter explains that the building was America’s first real science museum, created through the gift of the wealthy British scientist James Smithson. Smithson left a substantial fortune to the country and asked its founders to establish a place devoted to increasing and diffusing knowledge. The castle thus embodies a bequest with a civic purpose: private wealth is converted into an institution meant to serve public learning. Its scientific displays, laboratories, and collections give that purpose a concrete history rather than leaving it as an abstract ideal.

A Living Institution

In Peter’s account, the castle’s history includes basement laboratories, exhibit-lined corridors, a salon of mollusks, and scientists who called themselves the curators of crustaceans. A photograph of two popular resident owls, Diffusion and Increase, turns the institution’s founding language into an affectionate detail. Peter then broadens the view from the castle to a satellite image of the National Mall, now lined with Smithsonian museums. The original landmark is presented as the beginning of an institution that has grown well beyond its first building.

Role in Peter’s Address

The castle appears in a slide presentation Peter gives at Phillips Exeter Academy, where Robert Langdon watches from the back of the assembly hall. Through the sequence of images and corrections, Peter makes the building a teaching tool: its apparent English identity gives way to its Washington location, and its historic interiors lead to the story of Smithson’s gift and the modern Smithsonian. Peter concludes by describing the Institution as a tribute to a national dream grounded in knowledge, wisdom, and science. A student’s question about the founders’ religious beliefs then complicates that account, placing the castle’s educational symbolism within a larger discussion of the principles on which the country was founded.